Disappointment and Discovery at Lake Luzerne

Nope.   Not a sign of them.  I drove up to Lake Luzerne today, just to look for some Purple Fringed Orchids I always find on a little island there.  But not this year.  Not even a bud.  That's the way it goes, with orchids.  Let's hope they're just resting up this year for some burgeoning bloom in the future.  In the meantime, though, it's hard to stay disappointed long in such a beautiful place as Lake Luzerne.  It's here that the Hudson River, having ambled its way down from the Adirondacks, with plenty of room to spread out as it makes its way through the Ice Meadows north of Warrensburg, is suddenly crowded by high rocky banks and forced to plummet through a gorge at Rockwell Falls.

Today, because of a summer unusually hot and dry, the river is low enough to allow me to walk right up to the edge of the falls and not only hear but feel the roaring power of all that plunging water.

You may hear it, too, it you like.

While climbing around on those rocks, I was pleased to greet many of my old flower friends that I always expect to find here.  One of the daintiest is the pretty blue Kalm's Lobelia.

Another inhabitant is Narrow-leaved Mountain Mint, which today had opened all of its puffy clusters of bloom.

This is a flower that looks completely white from a distance, but a closer look reveals a sprinkling of purple polka-dots.

  
Whats this?!  Goldenrod already?!  Yes, I know, this is called Early Goldenrod for a reason, but early July?!  Looking back through the last 10 years of my flower journals, I see that this is really really early for this flower.

The same can be said for Purple-stemmed Aster, the earliest of our large purple asters to bloom.  But in past years, early meant late July.  But there it was, blooming away on the banks of the Hudson today.

The same snowless winter and extra-hot, low-rainfall summer  that has brought many flowers to blooming at least two weeks early this year, has also dropped water levels in the Hudson.  As I looked upstream from Rockwell Falls, I could see dry land below the banks, where in other years there would only be rushing water.  Hmm, I thought, let's see what might have popped into bloom along here.

Hah!  Here by the hundreds were the little rascals that elude me for years at a time, or grant me maybe one tiny yellow blossom after weeks of searching.  I'll bet these myriad Creeping Spearworts have been waiting for years under all that water, and now is their day in the sun.

As I made my way upstream along the muddy banks, I came to large mats of the most amazing green.  Oh my, I thought, that particular color of green sure looks like Golden Pert.  I wonder if I will find any blooming here.  I have never found it upstream from Moreau, but then, I've never found mudflats here above Rockwell Falls, either.

Yup, Golden Pert is indeed what it was!  Its little yellow trumpets were just starting to open, but the bright yellow-green of its leaves was already spreading a golden glow along the river bottom.

A little ways upstream, and that green-gold glow was amended by tawnier carpets of another plant that was taking this advantage of low water-levels to grow abundantly.

A closer look at those tawny carpets revealed a plant with many reddish buds and fuzzy white puffs along the leafless stems that just might be flowers.

An even closer look reveals what look like oblong anthers dangling on fine filaments, and perhaps that's a pistillate structure in the middle of them.  Are those fluffy little clusters then the fruits?  I really have no idea what this plant is, because I have never seen it before and I can't find anything like it in any of my wildflower guides.

Update:  Thanks go out to wildflower expert Carol Gracie for recognizing this mystery plant as some kind of milfoil, then to Ohio botanist Andrew Gibson for pouring through the manuals to determine that this is Slender Milfoil (Myriophyllum tenellum).  Following up on their suggestions, Garrett Crow,  co-author of the two-volume Aquatic and Wetland Plants of Northeastern North America, has clinched the ID, explaining that this species ONLY flowers when the water level drops enough to expose the plants.  Professor Crow added this is always a difficult plant to find, because it is usually submerged, and that he has NEVER seen this plant in bloom.  So it was quite a find, after all.

One plant I was NOT happy to find here was Purple Loosestrife.  At least there were only a few, and those few were spread out as individual plants, rather than in the mass invasions we sometimes see in roadside ditches and open marshes.   I was about to yank out this solitary plant when a Monarch arrived, so I went on my way and left the butterfly to enjoy its meal.

Then a second butterfly came and graced me with its presence.  Is there any creature more lovely than a Tiger Swallowtail?  Just one more compensation today for not finding that Purple Fringed Orchid.

Buds, Mud-lovers, and Bugs

Oof!  That heat outside sure was stifling today.  But lucky for me, I had chores to do inside my cool house, and I was happy for once to resist the call of the great outdoors.  Besides, I got my nature fix going over more of yesterday's photos, taken after I left the river and stopped off at Moreau Lake State Park to circle Mud Pond on the trail that runs through the woods.

My friend Sue had found a large patch of Checkered Rattlesnake Plantain (Goodyera tesselata) along the east side of the pond, and I was eager to check on the state of their buds.  A fellow nature enthusiast is coming all the way from Ohio the second week of July specifically to see some of New York's native orchids, so I'm hoping these tight green buds will be ready by then to show him their little white flowers.  This is not one of our showiest orchids, but hey, it's still an orchid!

Yes, I think that at least a few will be open ten days from now.

For quite a while now, there haven't been many flowers blooming in the deep shade of the woods,  but yesterday I saw the first pretty pink blooms of Pointed-leaf Tick Trefoil.

When the trail reached the western side of the pond, I followed a stream bed out to the shore, where a muddy flat lay baking under the sun.

This flat was covered with many different kinds of plants well-suited to this habitat.  The tiny white flowers here are Clammy Hedge-hyssop and the little blue ones are False Pimpernel,  both poking up from a solid groundcover of Water Purslane.

Here's a little clearer shot of that Clammy Hedge-hyssop, and it also shows the reddish sprawling stems of the Water Purslane, which will have flowers later on in the season, but such tiny ones you can barely see them.

Poking up from the almost uniform green of the mudflat plant carpet were these silvery tufts of Low Cudweed, a mud-loving relative of Pearly Everlasting that never grows any bigger than this little clump.

Back further from the shore, amid the tall growth of sedges and rushes, I found a patch of Bur Reeds, with fluffy white staminate flower heads riding higher on the crooked stalk than the lower-growing pistillate heads that look like spiky burs.   It will be easier to tell what species of Bur Reed this is, after the pistillate heads develop into clusters of nutlets whose shape is distinctive for each species.  This might be Lesser Bur Reed (Sparganium americanum), since the whole plant was only about 18 inches high.

The place was a-whirr with the constant zipping-about of dragonflies, and I noticed one Twelve-spotted Skimmer always returned to this perch each time it flew off.  Let me see if I can sneak up on it.

Success!  After at least a dozen tries,  I finally inched close enough to get a clear shot the next time the dragonfly landed.  I guess when they named this dragonfly, they only counted black spots.

Here was another dragonfly with a chalky-white tail, this one called, aptly enough, the Common Whitetail.  Note the distinctive dark-brown patterns on the wings. Those shapes remind me of skates' egg cases (Mermaids' Purses).

A third dragonfly with chalky-white markings was kind enough to sit for a photo.  This one is called Chalk-fronted Corporal, for the markings on its thorax that look like an army corporal's stripes.

One more bug, a big green grasshopper, species unknown.  It kept trying to hide on the underside of this leaf, but always kept at least one brown eye peering out at me.